HITLER

A performance study

Français

I was born in 1946, one year, four months and three days after Hitler committed suicide in his Berlin bunker. I grew up in Peru where a lot of people still admired Hitler and distrusted Jews. I remember instances from my childhood. Later at school we were shown Holocaust film footage: Auschwitz, the bulldozers pushing mountains of skeletal corpses into mass graves. At thirteen I was thoroughly disturbed, numbed and haunted by what I saw. What was I supposed to make of it?

At about twenty four, in London, I switched from fine arts to theatre and followed a charismatic director: Roy Hart. He was Jewish, and Hitler’s 'performance' was a recurrent theme. One could sum up what he called “singing”, his philosophy of the voice, as follows : “If you do not sing Hitler - Hitler will sing you.”

Having reached sixty-five, the so-called age of retirement, I had to confront Hitler before it became too late, as a way of addressing the ghosts and memories of all those caught in that unbelievable nightmare, and pay my respects - in the full realization that only one year, four months and three days separated me from the living reality of Hitler on earth.

This is a laboratory performance - a journey into troubled waters I have been meditating for years. When I decided to start performing it, I did it without rehearsing. I would set the stage and act out, going directly from the "oratory" to the laboratory performance. I could only spend a limited amount of time in hell facing what Anna Griève calls "radical evil." After the Preston performance in January 2012, I decided to organize the material into a representation – calling on the external directing vision of Linda Wise.

My humblest gratitude to those who put up with me as I lapsed and collapsed into these performance fantasies. Linda, first of all, who heard me rehearse in my (or her) sleep. Nick Hobbs who prospected so much material on Nazi Germany. The musicians who improvised along with me. A book I stumbled upon in a jumble sale in Chile: Götz Aly’s: The Nazi Utopia : How Hitler Bought the Germans (the English title is : Hitler's Beneficiaries: Plunder, Racial War, and the Nazi Welfare State). Liza Mayer, who admired Churchill. James Hillman, whose eyebrows went up when I told him I was performing Hitler - "Of course!" he said: "the voice!" And the Great Pan who is always around when I meet Hitler.

Enrique Pardo, January 2012